Whitechapel Gods (10 page)

Tom shrugged, cocked his head, and watched the clickrat nibble his boot. “We’re all a lesser class, Chief.
We were born here, weren’t we?
”

“Mmm…” Oliver scanned the yellowed paper. The topmost story read “Engineers Confirm the near completion of the Great Work.” It went on at some length about the heroic strides of the crows in bringing Mama Engine’s mysterious goal to fruition. They had been saying the same thing for years, so Oliver passed on. The next story detailed the capture of several groups of rebels in league with the British Crown, and dwelt at length on their various evils and the degree to which the streets would be safer now that they were gone. Oliver almost tore the paper in two right then.

The rest read like an advertisement for the grand benefits of joining up with the canaries.
Yes, please cut my heart out with a dull pick and replace it with a bunch of gears and springs. That would be smashing.

“Why are you reading that tripe, Ollie?”

“Shut your trap.” He folded the paper over and tucked it under his arm, with the intention of throwing it down the next hole he came to. “Did you notice if the cloaks were still performing searches?”

“Mainly up towards the lift,” Tom said. As he regarded the relentless assault of the little clickrat, a dull smile crept onto his face, as of a stern parent finally relenting at his child’s cries for candy. “I think I’ll keep him.”

Oliver frowned. “Keep him? That creature would eat the nose from your face.”

“Got some energy, eh?” Tom pulled a length of wire from the pocket of his oversized long coat. Oliver watched with fascination as Tommy bent down, squeezed the rat’s cheeks with his mechanical hand to make it release his boot, and held it fast while tying its jaws shut with the wire. That done, he lay the clickrat on its back in the palm of his hand, where it squirmed and clicked furiously. He removed another length of wire and bound all six legs together against its body with an ingenious multiple-layered loop.

Thomas held his prise high.

“I shall call him Jeremy Longshore the Third, and I dub him King of the Clickrats. May his reign be long and fruitful, free from tribulation, and rife with bountiful harvests and competent public works ministers.”

He dumped the struggling creature into a coat pocket and returned his attention to the Beggar’s Parade as if nothing had occurred.

Oliver shook his head in amazement. “Just don’t bring it in the hideout.”

“Aye, Captain.”

The hiss of steam echoed across the Underbelly, drawing both their eyes to the lift. It ascended the shaft on clacking chains, vanishing behind the massive clock that hung halfway up. Canaries would be stationed at the top of it as well as the bottom.

“We’ll have a bit of difficulty getting Sir Bailey’s prise out of this place, what with all this company,” said Tom.

“Not if Missy takes it.”

Tommy cracked a toothy grin. “Good call, that, mate. You’ve had this planned out for a while, then?”

“You know I’d have planned a deal more if Bailey deigned to render me as much information as we render him.”

Tommy made a sympathetic face.

“Yes, you’d surely be running all the crews by now. Poor Ollie: your greatness languishes unrealised.”

Yes, that’s it. Like a kick in the shins the morning after a good gaff.
He’d thought many times about breaking with Bailey and fighting their silent war independently. He’d worked it out to the last ha’penny: financing, recruiting, placement, encoding and packaging information—even a method to smuggle any gathered intelligence out of Whitechapel via the German airships. He was still working on a way in and out of the Stack, but Hews could help with that. It was his perpetual daydream: to personally contrive the fall of Baron Hume and his puppet master godlings.

But then his mind always came back to the Uprising, and the magnificent plan fell to ashes and scrap. He knew that no one blamed him for it. Many of the Shadwell locals still looked on him with awe, even gratitude, that he had dared to pick up a gun and do what he did. But the fact was that when the Boiler Men had marched down in their hundreds and shot half the men and a third of the women, he hadn’t been prepared. That was the truth of it.

As if to break their silence, Tom patted his pocket where the clickrat still fought furiously for his freedom. Tommy squeaked in mock outrage: “‘Give me liberty or give me death!’”

“He’s a Yankee, then?”

“He quotes freely from rebels and state heroes alike.”

Tommy stuck his mechanical hand into the pocket and made cooing sounds.

“Perhaps I’ll leave you two,” Oliver said. He straightened his vest and coat, then dragged one finger around the brim of his ash hat. It came back nearly clean. It was the one positive trait of the Underbelly: almost none of the grey snow got past the Concourse above. “I’ll be back around in twenty.”

He stepped off the sidewalk, tipped his hat to a passing madam he knew, and fell in step with the Parade, natural as donning an old slipper.

He moved along, shuffling and loping with the gait of the tired but vocal backers and sweaters, greeting those he knew, smiling politely at those he didn’t, until he was able to angle into the Amble. Disraeli’s Amble struck such a contrast to the busy and noisy Beggar’s Parade that for a moment Oliver’s ears rang with imagined shouts. The Amble never seemed to have carts, hawkers, or even much foot traffic. Everyone in the Underbelly agreed that it was named for Disraeli’s ghost who, having lost his famed “blank page” between the Old and New Testaments, had gone there to mope about it, and no one likes a mope.

He found Phineas in wide-eyed contemplation of a streetlamp. “Where are they?”

It was several seconds before the old sailor answered. “In their impossibly subtle way, they’re askin’ Bart Cagey about the state of the Underbelly.”

“Jolly good. He’ll be as helpful as a spokeless wheel,” Oliver thought aloud. “You’ll keep a watch on them?”

“I’ll keep an ear on ’em if it’s all the same. I can hear a lot farther than I can see.”

“Whatever suits.”

Phin cocked his head. His crushed top hat slid down over one ear. “Bart’s shaking hands now, tellin’ ’em how honoured he is to have ’em in his shop.”

“How far
can
you hear, Phin?” Oliver asked.

“A few blocks, now that I’m out of that blasted crowd. There’s a cloak coming up the Parade, by the bye.”

Oliver peered down to the sea of hats, looking for the signs: stiff-legged walk, rhythmic steps, straight spine. In seconds he’d picked out the cloak, a tall middle-aged man in a vest and beret, a stock of books balanced on a tray he held in front of him. A hawker not hawking, despite being shoulder-deep in potential customers. Why did these people even bother attempting stealth?

“I’ll dog him,” said Oliver. “At least until he gets onto Missy’s block. Keep that sharp ear open.”

Phineas nodded, already turning his attention back to the lamp. Oliver jogged down the Amble and took his place in the Parade.

Oliver had never been a good hound. He was far too tall, standing on average a full head above the stunted forms around him. His trick was to seem unimportant, so that when he inevitably drew a target’s eye he would render the appearance of a mere sweater, haggard and worn down by work and smoke and dark, and not worthy of more than a glance.

The cloak appeared oblivious to pursuit, a blind fox in a field of dogs. He walked purposefully ahead, maintaining the exact pace of the crowd, looking neither left nor right, not up at the dim ceiling many storeys above, nor down at the uneven and ever-shifting roadway.

Oliver had decided years ago that he hated crowds. People moved on the streets like herds of animals, barely daring to whisper to one another, lest they be overheard by some spy. They spoke to one another only in the safety of their own homes, and then in low voices, for their neighbour might own a clock, or their son or daughter might have been induced to betray them. Such was life beneath the thousand faces of Grandfather Clock and the omnipresent breath of Mama Engine.

Hews had once mentioned the congeniality of London, where people would speak easily on the streets, comment on weather and current events, shake hands, tip hats, and go off merrier than before. Oliver suspected more than a little romanticising on Hews’ part, for such was his habit, and Oliver had declared the whole story poppycock. Were there not policemen in London? Were there not ministers and noblemen and landowners? What was the difference if one’s overseers were flesh and blood instead of iron and brass?

Hews had told him to wait until he saw it.

The crowd slowed as it reached the “domino hole,” a gap in the Parade spanned by numerous wooden bridges of varying quality. The hole split the Underbelly from east to west, and on each side thin ledges ran along the sides of the closest buildings, called, respectively, Alley-on-the-Left and Alley-on-the-Right.

The disguised cloak huffed across the large central bridge with the flow of the crowd. Oliver was about to follow when he noticed a small child watching from Alley-on-the-Left. Oliver squinted at him over the heads of the crowd.
Do I know that one?

No,
he realised. That one wasn’t a native of the Underbelly, or was perhaps a new arrival, but Oliver thought not. He would be one of Scared’s children.

Oliver caught back up to the cloak rather quickly. The man seemed to have slowed the instant he touched the south ledge. Still, he walked with focus, staring ahead.

A little bell began ringing in Oliver’s head. On the pretence of stretching a sore neck, he glanced behind him. Two more gold cloaks, hard-eyed young gentlemen who had chosen gold vests instead of cloaks, hustled over the bridge in his wake. A third followed unhurriedly behind, a wide-beamed gentleman dressed in an impeccable grey suit and hat with a gold Albert chain and gloves.

“Christ on his bloody cross!” escaped Oliver’s lips. He barely noticed the offended looks from the people closest to him.

Oliver recognised the man. He was the one Oliver had seen shot dead just that morning in a warehouse in Stepneyside. They’d left him an inert and bloody mass staining the warehouse floor, and now he walked steady and stiff, in the manner of the gold cloaks, and had nothing to show for his injuries but a bruise on his cheek and a few isolated spots of oil showing through his vest.

He thought of Tommy stabbing himself in the heart, and a sourceless rage flushed into his face and neck. Men should
die
when they’re shot or stabbed. Men should greet women on the street. Children shouldn’t be hauled off by Chimney gangs or recruited to work for lizards like Scared!

His long fingers slipped around the grip of the derringer in his pocket. He gritted his teeth, fighting the instinct to whirl around and place a shot between the man’s eyes. He knew he could do it—he was tall enough to fire over the crowd, and his earlier shooting mishap, well, that had been because he wasn’t ready. He hadn’t the will, then.

His fingers uncurled. And he didn’t have it now. These poor sweaters and charwomen marching all around him didn’t deserve such a random end as a battle here would give them. It wasn’t their fight.

But it
was
their fight, damn it. Every able-bodied man should have taken up arms at the first opportunity. How could they go to the Baron’s factories and give their lives to Mama Engine’s Great Work? How could they drink the baron’s oily sludge and breathe his air and let their children do the same and do
nothing
?

He forced the anger down. His feet had carried him automatically in pursuit of his quarry, who was leading him expertly towards the thin, dead-end alley between a slanting bookshop and a yellow-windowed public house. He cursed himself.
You stupid bugger. You’re being led like a locomotive on a rail.
It occurred to him that the man might be a local, to have passed several other alleys all equally crooked and misanthropic and angled to the only one that ended without escape.

They were trying to trap him, of course. Oliver and company had done the same thing to their foxes many times. Luckily, then and now, the trick worked only on the unobservant and the inexperienced, and Oliver Sumner was neither.

He obediently followed his fox nearly to the mouth of the alley, passing between two vendors and their wagons, built of tin strips and rivets and loaded respectively with tiny flags and cotton breathing masks. As he stepped beyond the range of the streetlamps’ muddy light, he ducked suddenly and deftly to the left, stealing up the stairs and into the bookshop, sliding through the door without fully opening it.

A little bell dinged overhead.

He spun and peered through the window, squinting to see past the condensation on the outside of the glass. The cloth of gold his pursuers wore shimmered as they entered the range of the closest lamp. The two younger ones clearly wanted to charge directly into the alley mouth, but the grey-suit called to them and they stopped. The grey-suit gestured to the left and right, and the two subordinates took off along the walk at a trot. The man who should have been dead then reached behind his back, beneath his coattails, and drew forth the same large weapon he’d held that morning. He advanced with exaggerated caution towards the alley mouth.

Still feeling the sting from before, eh?

The subordinate dispatched in Oliver’s direction ran past the bookshop with nary a glance. Now would be an ideal time to escape, but Oliver hesitated, wondering if the subordinates had been ordered to circle back to the alley mouth after a block or two. It seemed a prudent order, and the canaries weren’t entirely fools. Better not to go out quite yet, then. Perhaps the shop would furnish another exit.

Oliver came about, and nearly jumped out of his skin.

“May I help you?” the proprietor grumbled. His face resembled a beaten scrap of unsculpted leather, lopsided and caved in around the eyes. The piercing yellow light of the store’s single electric lamp deepened all the crevices of his face and rumpled clothing. The man smelled of cinders and smoke.